A good internal linking helps Google to find your subsites more easily and to understand which topics are important for your website. However, the older a website and the less SEO-friendly its linking structure is, the more chaotic the linking structure ends up being. This can easily be prevented with topic clusters.
What is Topic Clustering?
Topic clusters are a group of content and keywords that belong to an overarching theme and are linked together. Usually, the SEO will create a so-called pillar page for this. There, it will link all the subsites with their fitting themes. Some may also talk about a content hub, meaning a pivot point for your content.
A topic cluster is the opportunity to structure your page in a way that the most important themes receive the most internal backlinks. This way, you will also show Google which topics are the most relevant to you and increase your chances of a good ranking.
What advantages do Topic Clusters offer?
Topic clusters have multiple strengths. They can help you structure your content and cover the topics first that are most important for your users and customers. It will quickly become obvious which topics are missing and where content repeats itself unnecessarily.
The creation of topic clusters also leads to you being much faster at producing content. Since you know which texts you need at what points and how they complement each other, you can generate content a lot more efficiently.
Whoever handles a topic in a high-quality and comprehensive way is a welcome guest within the Google rankings. However, the exhaustive coverage of a topic in a text desert with thousands of words is not the manner in which most internet users want to find information.
A topic cluster provides the opportunity to offer users exactly those subtopics that they are interested in. This is much more user-friendly and is well-regarded by Google.
Another important factor: your internal link structure will become impeccable with topic clusters. You can precisely direct your most important topic to get many internal backlinks so that Googlebots can quickly recognise which themes are important.
This way you can comfortably occupy long-tail keywords in your subtopics, while supporting your main keyword with all these subsites. It’s no secret that Google oftentimes rewards a well-thought out internal linking with better rankings.
How do I create a Topic Cluster?
If you want to construct a topic cluster, you should have a structured approach. After all, there are potentially dozens of articles tied to your strategy.
Therefore, you should, above all, put careful consideration into picking your main topic. The trick is to find a topic that fulfils many different aspects. Important factors for a topic could be:
- How relevant is this topic for your company?
- Is it of interest for your target demographic?
- Is the search volume high enough?
- Is it possible to break this topic down into many subtopics?
- Does the information build up on each other?
- Does content already exist on my website that would be fitting for this topic or covers the keywords?
A topic cluster is work intensive, which is why you should target those topics first that lead to the highest corporate success. This does not always include those keywords that the senior management might deem to be most significant. It is important to keep the target group in mind and find out how they look for goods and services.
You can get an insight about this through a keyword analysis, if you didn’t already carry one out. For a topic cluster it is important to know which keywords are looked up often and in what context. Frequently, you will already find a number of subtopics through the long-tail keywords that you should incorporate.
The frequently asked questions on Google will be an especially big help to find fitting topics. If you conducted a complete analysis or potentially even want to use your initial research, you can find many tools online that will cluster your keywords automatically for you.
You should not forget to organise the keywords for your most important topic, as well as subsequently ordering its sub-keywords. This order is often already a good way to help structure your pillar page and establish the subsites of the topic cluster.
However, this does not substitute a more exact research. Feel free to take a look at your competitors as well: examine the top 10 search results on Google closely and include missing topics. Wikipedia can be of great assistance as well.
If you find additional information, add it to the structure of the pillar page. From this, all subtopics arise. Create an editorial plan that starts with the pillar page and then tackles the most important subtopics. You can then produce this content and link all the subjects together. Already, your topic cluster is finished and you can add onto it over time.
Is creating a Topic Cluster in retrospect worth it?
If pages rank well, often a SEO does not want to touch them. But in most cases this is not a sufficient excuse to not cluster the content. Frequently, existing content can be restructured and even be strengthened with internal links. It’s also no secret that recurring updates of the content is necessary to keep rankings high.
Especially if there are problems with keyword cannibalisation within the website, ideas for fresh content are missing or no-one has an overview of the linking structure anymore it’s often helpful to cluster existing content as well.
For instance, well-ranking pages can gradually be turned into pillar pages or linked into an overarching content hub. It is important, however, to strictly separate articles with multiple topics to satisfy the search intent anew and avoid overlapping keywords.
What does Google say about Topic Clusters?
Google has been working for years on understanding companies and improving search results. The goal is to strengthen the diversity, as explained by Google in a blog post:
Subtopics
We’ve applied neural nets to understand subtopics around an interest, which helps deliver a greater diversity of content when you search for something broad. As an example, if you search for “home exercise equipment,” we can now understand relevant subtopics, such as budget equipment, premium picks, or small space ideas, and show a wider range of content for you on the search results page. We’ll start rolling this out by the end of this year.
How AI is powering a more helpful Google
Vice versa, this also means that it makes sense to cover all these subtopics of a page as well. On one hand, because users could be interested in them, on the other since Google wants to cover the different search interests as well. This is much easier and versatile to achieve with subtopics.
According to this line of thinking, topic clusters are exactly what can help you appear at the front of Google’s search results. It shows that you understand that a keyword has different subtopics and that you offer the content to fulfil all search intents.
Conclusion: Topic Clustering is sustainable SEO
A topic cluster helps users and Google to find important content and subsites.
But it also has important advantages internally: it helps find new, complementary and user-centric content and strengthens the internal linking. This way, website operators can build an authority over the main topic and simultaneously satisfy different search intents.
To make this strategy work, SEOs should pick the main themes in a very targeted and thought-out way. This ensures that the topic is a good fit to be a pillar page and that users can also profit from a page structured in this manner. Additionally, the search volume should suit the effort and the keyword should be valuable for the corporate goals.